The Talented Mr Ripley at Birmingham Rep and on tour – review

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is one of her most fascinating characters, so it is little surprise he has been given a number of incarnations over the decades. Matt Damon has taken on the role on the big screen and, more recently, Andrew Scott on the small screen. Now Ed McVey steps into his shoes in this new stage version, now running at Birmingham Rep and touring throughout England.

McVey is the perfect fit, dominating the production as the ruthless Ripley but also ensuring we see him as a troubled human being, and one we can’t help but secretly like. He talks to the audience throughout, sharing his own fears, constantly going over in his mind his options and trying to second-guess what other people might be thinking, doing or realising. In doing so, he captures his character’s paranoia – the fact that Ripley may on the surface be literally getting away with murder, but that in fact he will never escape his own actions.

Adapted and directed by Mark Leipacher from Highsmith’s 1955 novel, the play closely follows the original plot. When small-time conman Tom Ripley is approached by a worried father anxious to bring his son Dickie back from Europe to America, Ripley pretends to be a great friend of the missing playboy and is paid to head off to Italy to convince Dickie to return.

There, dazzled by Dickie’s rich and dissolute lifestyle, Ripley then inveigles his way into the household – but when Dickie begins to bore of his new plaything, Ripley is forced to take action.

Bruce Herbelin-Earle gives us a languorous Dickie whose life is filled with beaches and cocktails and who is so used to discarding those he no longer needs, he doesn’t see the risk in trying to free himself of Ripley. His dismissiveness in the face of other people’s needs ensures we don’t warm to Dickie and instead feel some sympathy for Ripley as he faces being cast off.

Maisie Smith as Dickie’s girlfriend Marge is initially welcoming to the stranger but soon turns against him, rightly suspecting something isn’t quite right with Ripley’s limpet-like attraction to the couple. Smith gives us an endearingly innocent Marge who simply wants a nice life with a guy she loves.

Whether Leipacher feels the story is too thin or he simply wants to play around with the narrative, he injects a lot of different levels into the tale. This comes in the shape of a series of trenchcoated bystanders who act as both chorus and conscience and who also demand “cuts” and “re-takes” in which some of the pivotal scenes are re-run with varying outcomes. On top of this, the dead Dickie keeps reappearing, echoing Ripley and even speaking for him in some cases.

While these elements might look stylish, they do at times become a little muddled and add unnecessary complications to a plot already packed with twists and turns.

Leipacher also comes down on the side of Ripley being either gay or bisexual, so that the attraction to Dickie is laden with eroticism and the frustration at his rejection sexually charged.

The story takes place across lots of glamorous locations in Europe, and Holly Pigott’s sets make little attempt to reflect this, instead opting for a stylised stage in which all the action is concentrated in one place. This ensures the audience isn’t distracted by landscapes but instead totally focused on the relationships between its main characters.

What the play does do is remind us just how clever Highsmith was at creating both ingenious stories and brilliantly multi-faceted characters, who we are never quite sure whether we love or loathe.